How does Shakespeae glorify his friends in sonnet 18?

Answer 1

Shakespeare takes an image that is normally used to compliment an individual and twists it. He's saying that he can't even compare his subject to something as beautiful as a summer's day because their beauty exceeds it. The subject is "more lovely" than a summer's day. He then points out the flaws of the summer, such as it's transience (we all know fall seems to come way too soon) and sometimes the sun (or "eye of heaven") is too hot or hidden from view. He then says that while every fair, or beautiful, thing eventually becomes less beautiful that's not the case with the person he is writing the Sonnet for. Thier "summer" is eternal and not even death can take it away because their beauty is immortalised in his poem. Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines, And often is his gold complexion dimm'd; And every fair from fair sometime declines, By chance or nature's changing course untrimm'd; But thy eternal summer shall not fade Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest; Nor shall Death brag thou wander'st in his shade, When in eternal lines to time thou growest: So long as men can breathe or eyes can see, So long lives this and this gives life to thee.

Answer 2

Shakespeare immortalizes his friendship (I assume you are speaking of Sonnet 18) in two ways. First, he uses a metaphor to compares the friend to a summer day. A summer day is temperate (no extremes). A summer day has the golden sun to warm it. Shakespeare says that the friend is even more temperate, and says that even the golden sun can become too strong, but his friend has only the good qualities of such a day, and, in fact, the friend's goodness surpasses the summer. Shakespeare then declares that these qualities of the friend will never know Death because Shakespeare has written down these lines and the writing of them immortalizes the friend. He acknowledges that summer days can pass but a sonnet, composed and written down, can never "die". He says that as long as men can breathe and see and as long as "this" (the sonnet itself) lives, the friend will "live" as well.

Good luck on the test. :O

Answer 3

By comparing him to a summer's day. Really. The point of the poem is that the handsome young man would become old and ugly within 50 or 60 years, but if Shakespeare wrote a poem about him, people would remember his beauty for 400 years or more. And by Gadfrey he was right!